It’s a sad thing to see the
fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party skew its values to line
up with those of the money-driven Wall Street wing when global
warming is at issue. But it is even sadder to see even the
non-religious side of the GOP adopting true-believer doublethink to
sustain these monetized values.
The Christian
Broadcasting Network recently posted an article called “Dispelling
the myths of global warming” that gives the business-oriented Cato
Institute equal time with climate scientists and includes this
clincher: “Critics of Kyoto say signing onto it would erase 3
percent from our gross domestic product. That is over $350 billion
a year.” In a column on the topic, George F. Will exposed the
underlying value choice: How could it be worth “the cost of slowing
economic growth” to counteract global warming?
Money
first, money always. It’s what the preacher at my childhood Baptist
church used to call worshipping Mammon. In pursuit of this value, a
fundamentalist “science” outfit here in Portland, Ore.,
misleadingly called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine,
promotes a phony list of some 17,000 scientists who disbelieve
there really is any greenhouse-gas problem at all. Although some of
the signers are fictitious and few are scientists at all — as
exposed by Media Matters for America.com — the list got
abundant airtime on the 700 Club. They’re right
in line with George W. Bush’s campaign doubts on the matter. In
February, Jerry Falwell explained the opposition: “There are
multitudes of respected scientists who feel that this is a cyclical
phenomenon and they point to the 1970s — only 30 years ago
— when many scientists were also predicting global cooling.”
George Will often resists the fundamentalist Christians
of his Republican party. He mocks them in print, for instance, when
their creationists try to suppress the teaching of science. Yet in
his column on global warming, he follows Falwell’s reasoning
precisely: What scientists predicted in the 1970s didn’t happen
then; so what they’re claiming now — global warming —
won’t happen either. Leading to his conclusion: Let’s not disrupt
business. Such logic is an example of treating science as a kind of
rhetorical game — comparing statements and playing gotcha.
When I was a student at a California evangelical college
a while ago, we learned to beware of selecting tidbits from the
Bible’s hundreds of pages in order to prove a foregone conclusion.
We understood that such “proof-texting” was really a way of
imposing one’s prejudices on the texts.
Fundamentalists
do science the same way. They oppose the teaching of evolution, for
example, by proof-texting it. They snipe at selected details while
ignoring the millions of data-points in confirmation. It’s
apparently how they think — that it’s all right to bend a few
pet facts into a defense of some untouchable point of belief.
On climate science, Will seems oddly content to think in
the same shoddy way.
Oregon scientist George R. Miller
was one of those 1970s climatologists whom events would prove
wrong. In a recent letter to the Oregonian, Miller said he and
others based their global-cooling forecasts on three long-term
geophysical cycles: orbital eccentricity, axis tilt, and axis
precession. The geological record shows these long-term cycles
regularly triggering ice ages of relative mildness. But now, to
quote Miller:
“The fact that Earth should be entering a
cooling phase regarding the above cycles, especially precession,
makes the subject of global warming even more scary: The Earth’s
atmosphere is warming when it should be cooling.”
Ah. In
a sense those scientists were not wrong: the Earth is exactly where
they said it was in these cycles, and in the past this would have
meant a long slow cool-down. But this trend is now countered by the
unprecedented effects of atmosphere-altering civilization, verified
in almost daily measures of arctic melting, sea-temperature and
sea-level rises, and the like. But in Wills’ view, the evidence of
physical warming scarcely registers; he writes as if it were just a
matter of documents to compare and juggle.
All toward the
faith-based conclusion: Let us not disrupt business as usual. Let
us continue making money. Let us have no other gods before that.
For that is where some Republicans really worship.
Next
question: Do we think the other party is doing that much better?
David Oates is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He lives in Portland, Oregon, and his latest book is City
Limits: Walking Portland;s
Boundary.
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